by Jade Small: From black slippers, an ordinary watch and an unstitched white cloth to Rolls Royces, diamond-studded Swiss fake watches, rich flowing gowns and Gucci goggles…

Osho was one of the most famed as well as the most controversial spiritual leaders of his time. He came to be known as ‘Acharya Rajneesh’ in 1960s, assumed the name ‘Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’ during the 1970s and 1980s and called himself ‘Osho’ in 1989. He was a professor of Philosophy and traveled extensively to various parts of India, giving lectures on Secularism and Gandhi. He institutionalized religion and advocated an open attitude towards sexuality, which landed him in a number of controversies. Founder of Osho International Meditation Center, he devised a number of meditation techniques and came to be known as a spiritual therapist.

Nonetheless, his following has only grown since his passing, beginning to gain more and more traction in the west and heavily influencing certain veins of New Age thought. His philosophies, continually coming back to a core of love and unity through the loss of ego – and advocating meditation as an essential tool for accessing such states – combined with his incendiary criticism of the dominant world institutions, his offensive sense of humour and his views on sexuality continue to offer a blend that is seductive to inquiring minds. Here, then, are 22 quotes from one of the most controversial spiritual leaders of the last century, as collected from angel fire.com. {WP}

• ‘PHILOSOPHY is a disease, and not an ordinary one either. It’s not a common cold. It is cancer – cancer of the soul. Once a person is lost in the jungle of philosophy he becomes more and more entangled in words, concepts, abstractions and there is no end to it. One can go on and on for lives together.’

• ‘TRUTH happens in a state of not knowing, truth happens in innocence. Truth happens where there are no clouds of thoughts moving in your consciousness, when sky is absolutely clear, when there is no abstraction, when you have no idea, and God is or God is not. When you don’t believe in no-God, when you are simply in a state of not knowing. You don’t claim any knowledge, that non-claiming consciousness begins to open up. All knowledge burdens and closes you.’

• ‘BUDDHA did not teach anything to believe in. He was not a teacher in that sense, because he did not teach. He was, on the contrary, an anti-teacher, he took away all the teachings that people were carrying. Slowly, he helped his disciples to become nude, naked.’

• ‘TRUTH is simple. Very simple – so simple that a child can understand it. In fact, so simple that only a child can understand it. Unless you become a child again you will not be able to understand it. It is an experience, not speculation.’

• ‘LOVE deeply, love without jealousy, love blissfully and help each other to be more meditative. Because what else can we do and what can we share? Man is born naked without anything. Love should be the beginning of sharing something. Your love becomes a spiritual phenomenon.’

• ‘WHEN you love a person all fear disappears. And when you are afraid all love disappears.’

• ‘WHEN you love, you have to become nobody. If you remain somebody, then love never happens. When you love a person – even for a single moment love happens and flows between two persons – there are two nothingness, not two persons. If you have ever had any experience of love, you can understand it.’

• ‘WHEN two lovers are making love, and if they are both no-selves, nothingness, then a spontaneous pleasurable sensation happens. Then their body energy, their whole being, loses all identity; they are no more themselves – they have fallen into abyss. But this can happen only for a moment: again they regain, again they start clinging. That’s why people become afraid in love.’

• ‘ONE becomes scared of love, then people remain satisfied with bodily love and they believe this to be love in its entirity.’

• ‘WHEN you want to love God, you have to be without mask. You have to drop all deceptions. You have to be authentically whatsoever you are; to be choiceless, whatsoever you are. In that primal innocence, God descends.’

• ‘GOD is just a name of the totality of existence.’

• ‘GOD chooses first, then you start feeling a hunger for him…men can not choose God, it is God who chooses man.’

• ‘DEATH is a door to God. Those who knows how to die know how to enter into God. Clingers clinging to life never know what God is.’

• ‘WHENEVER you meditate and you come upon beautiful spaces, immediately pray to existence: ‘ Let my joy be showered over every being – conscious, unconscious. I don’t want any personal claim over it.’

• ‘WHEN you pray purify your intelligence and it becomes your wisdom. Purify yourself completely and you become one with whole. And to be on with the whole is the ultimate benediction, the blissfulness, the experience for which thousands of people have been searching down the ages on wrong paths. This world has to be loved, this world has to be respected, this world has to be your temple, your mosque your church. This world has to be your gratefulness, your gratitude. Enlightenment is not something of another world. Enlightenment happens now and here.’

• ‘WHAT is a prayer? Prayer is sending blessing to all. Prayer is sending your compassion to all. Prayer is creating an antidote of negative thoughts – it is positively.’

• ‘IN the days of Buddha, or in the days of Lao-Tzu, the world was very very peaceful, natural, it was a heaven. Why? The population was very very small, one thing. People were not thinkers too much, they were more and more prone to feeling rather than thinking. And people were praying. In the morning, they would do the first thing and that would be a prayer. In the night they would do the last thing—the prayer. And through out the whole day also, when ever they would find a moment, they would be praying inside.’

• ‘IF you are born Mohammedan, you have to disappear as a born Mohammedan. If you are a born Hindu, you have to disappear as a born Hindu. You have to find your natural qualities- because only nature grows. Birth is accidental, birth determines nothing. It was coincidence that you were born in a home where people were Hindus – it is as much a coincidence as if they belonged to a particular political party. If your parents were Catholics you need not to be a catholic. You have to search for your own path; each one has to search for his own path.’

• ‘FAITH is not belief, it is love. Faith is not belief it is not half, it is total. Faith is not belief because there is no doubt in it, so how can you believe?’

• ‘ FAITH is not rationalization at all: neither for nor against, neither this nor that. Faith is a trusting, a love.’

• ‘ HEART doesn’t know what doubt is, heart doesn’t know what BELIEVE is- heart simply knows trust. Heart is like a small child; the small child clings to the father’s hand, and wherever the father is going the child is going, neither trusting nor doubting. The child is undivided. Doubt is half, belief is half. A child is still total. Whole.’

• ‘RELIGION is just like an oasis; the desert is vast, and sometimes in tiny parts of the desert an oasis appears. And while it lasts, seek it, and while it is there, drink of it- and it is very very rare.’